steelcity_ballin wrote: Right now I'm still pretty partial to the engineer - possibly asura but nothing definite.

I dunno, I personally found the Asura starting area to be more "disorganized" than the others, same goes for their capital city... Plus the characters themselves look kinda disturbing, especially the ones that looked like Mickey Mouse, or very close to it. I much preferred Charr as engies, even though I'm not really into furry stuff Anyway, there should be a new forum thread for this game since it is not beta anymore.

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I played until 4AM without issue. I had an initial DC about 1.5 hours in and then after I hit the overflow servers I was golden. Can't even begin to say how fun this game is for me. I love that from my inventory there is a "Deposit all craft mats" button. Still getting the hang of things. The Asura starting area was a lot of fun. Mini games, events, and personal story. I chose to save my krew mate frakk rather than go after the inquest double crosser at this point. I could be wrong but I feel like the main female in this personal story is voiced by Felicia Day. So far so good, jumping on again soon

So after the last 2 days playing what are everyone's thoughts? I have to admit I didn't like the Beta, I made a warrior and found targeting and keeping focus on targets problematic for me. For the roll out once they got the server issues worked out I went with a human ele and having been playing that since.The world seems vast, I just finished Queensdale and Divinty's Reach , finding all the places and points. I'm level 16 and really have done nothing with crafting or banking. The Swamp event is pretty cool and have used the gates to unlock the other areas. Considering I've played Guild Wars for 7 years, I think this one has the content to be just as replayable. Guildwiki 2 has been down it will be nice when thats back up so I can figure what all the new stuff is for. What'd everyone think so far?

I spent the last two days questing on just one toon, my Nord Guardian. So since I played the beta weekends I was quite familiar with the Nord starting area and the 15-25 area. Because of that familiarity I was able to bust through the starting area to full completion and move on rather quickly than the masses did on Saturday. However in doing so I found that I was at a complete disadvantage when moving on as the difficulty suddenly ramped up and I was 3 levels lower than the mobs around me. But that was ok because I just flip flopped from the Nord 15-25 area and the Char 15-25 area to get leveled.

While I like the dynamic quests I find some quests that are really dumb, the Char area for instance there were three that stick out; the first was the 'meatober' event where I had to give food and drink to soldiers, I couldnt quite figure that one out (where the heck is the food and drink?). The second was when I took on the form of a bull and then ran through a course that detailed every skill, while easy it was boring and long. The last one that I felt was quite dumb was catching insects and then feeding them to the cows, this felt like busy work just for some Karma points.

Anyways I do like the quest system. My biggest gripe it that the quest givers turn into merchants after you complete their quests and it quite hard to track what they sell. Sometimes things were over-level for me so I would write down who they where, where they were, and what they sold so I could go back and spend my 4k+ worth of karma.

I still havent crafted anything or got mats. I just put it all in the bank.

So a ton of question for you that are familiar with GW (I never played GW1):

Where do I get larger bags than the 4 slot ones? Where do I get more bank space?

I see others wearing cool armor is this some type of transmorg thing where I can change the look of an item? If so how do you do that?

Do / commands work? like /dance or /wave?

While I am content with the Guardian, its skills feel a little wonky to me. Mostly I am two handing everything as that seems the best. Sometimes I sword and board it for the two shield skills I get. Problem is those 'oh crap' moments where I get into trouble. I know I have the self heal (or group heal if I spent points on it) and I also have a skill that blocks incoming attacks for a very short period of time, but there's no healing pots that I could see or find. Are there things like this?

Yesterday the Auction house was down all day so I couldn't sell a ton of things that I couldn't use for my profession/class. So it sits in hopes that it will be up at some point.

I think I may try a hunter or thief. Personally I love the thief/rogue class but as I saw yesterday on some of the larger dynamic events I saw that profession/class was always the first to die or become incapacitated. I also saw the same with hunter pets. I don't know if this was because of the player or the class itself and its a little worrisome.

But all in all I have to give GW2 a big thumbs up. There are a ton of things I like; Dynamic events, waypoints, the areas are quite large, stumbling on an area on the map that I have never discovered only to find my dynamic quests or events, no kill or resource stealing, capital cities are freaking huge!, re-playability.

I spent the entire playtime I had available this weekend on one toon, my Asuran Engineer! I felt the initial start land for the Asuran was, at a glance, a little disorganized but once I got my lay of the land, I changed my mind. I spent 85% of the time question and doing my personal story. The other time was spent playing with the crafting system.

As far as questing goes, I absolutely love the mostly open way that you don't need to find quests. You explore the land finding vistas (another really nice extra) and looking for open/public quests to do. I like that it levels you down to the area you're in such that if you've missed some obvious questing exp, you'll still receive full value for doing it later on because of the de-level.

Crafting so far is much better than I've played in other games. I always disliked that the effort you put into crafting can only be measured in gold return but since you earn so much exp for crafting, it's well worth it. I took up leatherworking and cooking. Cooking seems to be the most expensive (and they tell you as much) but also probably the best way to make cash. You can craft dyes from cooking, which I think is awesome.

Jumping back to the personal story - I really like this feature. I was afraid that it would be too cookie-cutter or unimportant. However the exp you gain as you progress is very good. It's rewarding and I feel like my choices matter when I choose option A over B to advance the story.

My one complaint is about a very specific area (the thermal-something-or-other) where there's a giant fire elemental on the loose inside and you need to deal with it. First, this event scaled well above what I thought was challenging into "This is fricken stupid" hard. Basically there's an invisible attack that knocks you down, and the elementals are spawning AoE fire under you. Not a single person could withstand being hit. A hit was almost guaranteed death. A knockdown always was. I must have died 20 times trying to kill it. The scaling was bad here because there were some lowbies who didn't belong here (It's rated 15-16 I believe) so they were increasing the difficulty via event scaling without bringing anything to the fight. Annoying. Next, those elementals dropping the AoE that nukes anything increase in number and seemed to respawn instantly and forever. The only reason we beat the thing is because we just kept running back and dogpiling on the boss. After about 45 minutes of this, it died. I received Bronze reward for my effort? Oh f*** you.

steelcity_ballin wrote:My one complaint is about a very specific area (the thermal-something-or-other) where there's a giant fire elemental on the loose inside and you need to deal with it. First, this event scaled well above what I thought was challenging into "This is fricken stupid" hard. Basically there's an invisible attack that knocks you down, and the elementals are spawning AoE fire under you. Not a single person could withstand being hit. A hit was almost guaranteed death. A knockdown always was. I must have died 20 times trying to kill it. The scaling was bad here because there were some lowbies who didn't belong here (It's rated 15-16 I believe) so they were increasing the difficulty via event scaling without bringing anything to the fight. Annoying. Next, those elementals dropping the AoE that nukes anything increase in number and seemed to respawn instantly and forever. The only reason we beat the thing is because we just kept running back and dogpiling on the boss. After about 45 minutes of this, it died. I received Bronze reward for my effort? Oh f*** you.

Yeah I have ran into this often this past weekend. My worry is what is going to happen once the masses pass through and area say some six months down the road and there may only be 5 of you in the area? Is it going to scale correctly for one person or is this something you are going to have to skip?

tanker27 wrote:Yeah I have ran into this often this past weekend. My worry is what is going to happen once the masses pass through and area say some six months down the road and there may only be 5 of you in the area? Is it going to scale correctly for one person or is this something you are going to have to skip?

This issue alone will destroy re-playability.

I ran into a few heart-quests where only myself and maybe one other person were doing it, and it felt challenging without being over-whelming. As long as they are all tuned around that idea I think it'll be ok. Did you check out the cultural armor/weapon vendors? Sah-weet looking gear.

For me as an Asuran, it's in my main capital city of Rata Sum. The gear starts at level 35. It appears the armor cost is in gold, and the weapons are in karma. I saw the Sylvari vendors in their capital city too. I previewed all my gear, looks pretty cool. The tiers work in reverse so tier 1 is the best that I've seen. tier 3 is the level 35 stuff.

I have a favorite combo I've been using as an engineer: Rifle jump into combat, drop a "big old bomb", net shot them, blunderbuss them, Rocket kick them, then rifle skill4 to get away (forget the name that damages them and blasts you away). Alternatively you can use the rocket boots to replace this last step too if you want the extra fire damage. So satisfying to nail the entire sequence. Right now I'm specc'd for bombs and I just got my level 10 trait point into it and chose large blast radius for bombs

I wish I could use grenades easier; There's an option in the menu to auto cast where the mouse is rather than bringing up a targeting and that helps, but it'd be nice if they were target oriented too. Maybe I'm just a crappy grenadier.

tanker27 wrote:oh and another question, Can someone explain to me what conditional attacks (I think thats what it it called) stat is and how is it used and calculated.

Conditional attacks are attacks that cause additional types of effects that bestow a negative status of sorts. There are a lot of them. You can think of them as DoTs but they all don't necessarily deal damage. Conditions are effects like Fumble, cripple, bleed, burning etc. Conditions also stack. There's a mob type I ran into that stacks cripple, I was slowed for a dot worth about 15 seconds. With that in mind you can see how important cleansing-like abilities are for pvp.

You also have combos that can apply conditions too. So If I have a burning field up and you perform a compatible attack through my field, you may then add your attack plus any condition damage you may do PLUS an additional stack of burning I think. Check this out: http://mastodonte.fr/outils/tool-combo#en

If it's stackable, sure. Not sure what the limit is or if it's even the same for any/all conditions. I've seen bosses with 5 stacks of burning/bleeding on them. You def want to use combo fields, lots more dps.

Blah... don't know about your server, but mine (Northern Shiverpeaks) seem to have insanely high WvWvW queues... Been queued for a couple of hours and nothing Don't really understand why would so many people be allowed to log into server if there are such huge queues for WvW, considering it's the main focus of the game and the only "endgame content" after everyone is done with PvE leveling...

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I had a blast exploring a coastline last night with my friend. We found these diving goggles near a cliff that when you put them on, you end up in your swim trunks to dive off the cliff. Found a vista there too and a sweet caché of strawberries! Any who - Invited some friends from other servers into a party so we could chat as we played, worked well. Trading Post was down last night, and the game received an update. MY game is still crashing even with the new Nvidia drivers. Sometimes I can play for hours without a hangup, last night it had to be every 15 minutes on average. At one point it wouldn't even load the game, it would crash repeatedly to the desktop. I had to reboot my machine to get it stable. I'm going to tweak a few things and check my overclocks and what not - it may be my fault although It's been where it's currently clocked for about a year or so, and no other games give me guff.

Still a very very enjoyable experience outside of the crashing. I found these veteran oakhearts in the human 15-25 area that have decent drops, lots of blues. I got a nice shield, pistol, rifle, and chest piece just randomly. Can't wait to hop on tonight!

I just got a GMail notification of a new email. To my chagrin, it states I requested to have my password reset, along with a link with which to do so. The problem is, I didn't freakin' do it. I checked GMail's activity list and sure enough, 2 entries that don't make sense to me. I have 2 hits from Michigan (I live in PA if it wasn't obvious, and have no business in MI). I also have 2 IP addresses that return a very strange website with just an informal google query. It sends me to a site about botsvsbrowsers.com leading me to think that maybe it was some malware that grabbed my info.

At any rate, I signed all other sessions out and created a new password. I'm still not feeling too happy about it. Most recently was yesterday, and then the only other time I see is 8/23 from MI as well. It may have nothing to do with ArenaNet or maybe it does. Seems suspicious - did anyone else get anything like this?

steelcity_ballin wrote:I just got a GMail notification of a new email. To my chagrin, it states I requested to have my password reset, along with a link with which to do so. The problem is, I didn't freakin' do it. I checked GMail's activity list and sure enough, 2 entries that don't make sense to me. I have 2 hits from Michigan (I live in PA if it wasn't obvious, and have no business in MI). I also have 2 IP addresses that return a very strange website with just an informal google query. It sends me to a site about botsvsbrowsers.com leading me to think that maybe it was some malware that grabbed my info.

At any rate, I signed all other sessions out and created a new password. I'm still not feeling too happy about it. Most recently was yesterday, and then the only other time I see is 8/23 from MI as well. It may have nothing to do with ArenaNet or maybe it does. Seems suspicious - did anyone else get anything like this?

tanker27 wrote:Has there been any word on when the Auction House will be available? It was broken pretty much all day Saturday and then down for maintenance since Sunday.

I haven't heard anything yet - Stinks that it's not working yet, really delays the economy. I didn't try it last night though. I only got to play for about 45 minutes last night. I really need some bag-space in a bad way, come on ANet! The feature I really want working is server-guests because I have a few friends that I want to play with on different servers.

I played last night without a single crash, although I did experience a really strange interaction. I was in Kessex Hills going for a skill point that I got and that leveled me to 23. I fast-traveled to the closest town. Then the game started loading a map for kessex hills again, ported me BACK to near the skill point. I noticed that my level was gone (back to 22) and the skill was gone too. I just redid it, however it's REALLY scary knowing that their is not record of what I did and what level I was. It's almost as if it was somehow relying on the client to determine that data and then store it somehow online. How else could they explain what happened? I asked in game and no one else reported anything like it.

Holy crap I wasnt the only one! Yeah it happened to me last night too. I started a Human Engineer (I am having a blast with him, pun intended. I just suck at kiting) I went for a skillpoint in some cave, ported, load screen comes up, game kinda froze for 30 sec, then I find I am in the same cave minus the skillpoint and the XP.

tanker27 wrote:Holy crap I wasnt the only one! Yeah it happened to me last night too. I started a Human Engineer (I am having a blast with him, pun intended. I just suck at kiting) I went for a skillpoint in some cave, ported, load screen comes up, game kinda froze for 30 sec, then I find I am in the same cave minus the skillpoint and the XP.

I redid it for a loss of maybe 2 minutes and it stuck. Not sure what the deal with that was. I love my engineer. I use grenades, flame, and rifle with my rocket turret. So much damage and kiting.

B.t.w, to continue the topic of "password reset e-mails" - ArenaNet confirmed that there's currently a bot attack on "reset password" feature, so they simply disabled the whole feature for a while, along with other potentially exploitable features. You can read this info here:http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comm ... august_29/Like the post says - make sure you have a unique password for your GW2 account, not shared with any other online accounts you might have.

P.S: Here's a random, game-related photo

Teh statue is pretty nice in size, was packed extremely well (you can find plenty of "unboxing" videos on YouTube), with very good overall attention to detail and build quality (better than, for example, the statue of Alduin that came with Skyrim's CE). I'm not disappointed that I got this edition of teh game, just for the statue itself.

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